It's easy to write simple scripts for sending emails  but hard to make sure that your application deals with all the weird and wonderful things that can go wrong.

Pete McBreen is the author of Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative (Addison-Wesley, 2001, ISBN 0-201-73386-2). Software Craftsmanship has been named as a finalist in Software Development magazine's 12th Annual Jolt Awards (see http://www.sdmagazine.com/jolts/press_r1-29-02.htm).

The use case that we'll use for this article is the one introduced in
Part 4 of this series, sending emails to notify members of special events. This
will demonstrate the use of the
Net::SMTP classes in Ruby,
and in the process show how simple it is to use Ruby as a scripting language for
the Internet.